# data[].attributes.body
Internet helps define who we are

# data[].attributes.body
(Readings)

# data[].attributes.body
Exposure

# data[].attributes.headline
Media Language -Semiotics Theory-Roland Barthes

# data[].attributes.subject
Media Language -Semiotics Theory-Roland Barthes

# data[].attributes.body
Codes and Conventions

# data[].attributes.headline
Industry-Power and Media Industries Theory (Curran and Seaton)

# data[].attributes.subject
Industry-Power and Media Industries Theory (Curran and Seaton)

# data[].attributes.body
Ownership

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Curran and Seaton Power in the Media Industry.png

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Kira Cochrane

s this all?" That was the question that echoed around a generation of US housewives in the early 1960s. Theirs was the problem with no name, wrote Betty Friedan in her 1963 bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, and the symptoms were legion. They included creeping fatigue, tranquiliser and alcohol abuse, bleeding blisters that appeared suddenly on their arms, which doctors attributed not to the cleaning fluids they used constantly, but a deeper malaise. In the years since the war, women had grown smaller (department store buyers reported they had shrunk three or four dress sizes), more feminine (30% of women dyed their hair blond), and apparently much sadder.

That icon of femininity, Marilyn Monroe, had died of an overdose the year before, and Sylvia Plath - just as outwardly feminine, but with a hidden, crackling rage - killed herself in London in 1963. Her death came not long after she published her novel, The Bell Jar. It was the story of Esther Greenwood, who goes to New York to take up an internship at a women's magazine, as Plath once had, before finding she can never quite match her inner life to the perfect face she has to present.

A desperate, exaggerated femininity was being held up as an ideal for all women. In January 1963, Gloria Steinem, then a freelance journalist, packed her leotard in a hat box and auditioned to become a Playboy Bunny in an undercover assignment for Show magazine. Steinem exposed the low pay, sexual harassment and racism - black women were sniggeringly referred to as "chocolate bunnies" - and later, when she had become a feminist leader, wrote that all women were treated as bunnies.

A US debate that had started tentatively with President John F Kennedy's 1961 commission on the status of women blew up with Friedan's book, and continued, in 1966, with the creation of the National Organisation for Women, which Friedan initially led. These ideas began floating over to the UK - the feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham has said she began hearing arguments for women's liberation from the US and Germany around 1967. It was an age of early marriage in Britain, and larger families. The average age of first marriage for women in 1961 was 23.3, compared with 30 today; the average woman in 1964 had 2.95 children in her lifetime, while now she has 1.95.

The contraceptive pill arrived in the UK in 1961, but was mainly prescribed to married women - it wasn't until 1974 that it became widely, freely available. In her memoir, Promise of a Dream, Rowbotham writes that as a student in the early 1960s, "not only were we all ignorant about contraception, but we had no idea who we could ask for advice ... Abortion, an inconceivable horror of gin and screams, was still illegal." That changed in 1967, with the passing of the Abortion Act.

Women were yoked to men economically, not just because they earned much less - in 1970, for instance, women's earnings as a proportion of men's earnings were 54.8% - but because they often needed a signature from their father or husband to gain credit or buy bigger items. The economic debate sharpened suddenly in 1968, when women at the Ford plant in Dagenham went on strike for equal pay. That same year, the Observer reported on an official study that showed "a massive wastage of women's abilities and qualifications" and "at least four million women used virtually as slave labour". Half of Britain's working women were earning less than five shillings an hour. The Dagenham strike led to the Equal Pay Act in 1970, followed by the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975. But with only 4.6% of MPs being women in 1964, much of the action to change women's lives naturally took place at the grassroots. (The proportion of female MPs actually came in below 4.6% in every subsequent election until 1987, when it rose to a paltry 6.3%.)

In 1970, women organised a protest at the annual Miss World contest in London; that same year, the first National Women's Liberation Conference formulated demands for equal pay, equal education and opportunity, 24-hour nurseries, free contraception and abortion on demand. The following years brought the first national women's liberation march, the magazine Spare Rib, the publishing house Virago, the first women's refuge, Rape Crisis centres across the country, and campaigning groups including Southall Black Sisters. A body of feminist literature followed The Feminine Mystique, including Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, bell hooks's Ain't I a Woman, novels by Angela Carter, Marilyn French, Alice Walker, memoirs and poems by Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.

The world had opened up for women, but like the suffrage movement half a century earlier, the triumph was brilliant but partial. Fifty years on, the pay gap is smaller, but persists, parents are still stymied by the dearth of affordable childcare, it's estimated that 69,000 women are raped in England and Wales each year, two a week are killed as a result of domestic violence, and the paucity of women in public life continues: just over 22% of MPs are women; and only 17.4% of the cabinet. 1963 changed a lot, but the next 50 years starts now.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1963: the beginning of the feminist movement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kira Cochrane s this all?" That was the question that echoed around a generation of US housewives in the early 1960s. Theirs was the problem with no name, wrote Betty Friedan in her 1963 bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, and the symptoms were legion.

# data[].attributes.headline
Representation of Women in the Media 40s-60s

# data[].attributes.subject
Representation of Women in the Media 40s-60s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Representations of Women & Girls in the Media

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Lucy! I'm Home"- Ricky Ricardo, I Love Lucy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Although women are depicted in various roles and statuses in advertising-ranging from homemaker to business executive and from sex object to superwoman-it is only since the mid-20th century that women have been shown in roles other than purchaser of domestic products.

While some observers may be impatient with the traditional images of women used by major packaged-goods marketers, those depictions reflect meticulously calibrated research designed to detect the subtlest element of potential offense in the target group.

This market research-based advertising may not always show trend-setting women the images they want to see, but market research seldom leads advertisers far astray. In short, the roles of wife and mother continue to be performed by large numbers of women whom advertisers seek to address.

Targeting women: Early days

One of the most enduring female characters in advertising is Aunt Jemima, a trademark that had its beginnings in 1889. Invited to breakfast with millions of families all over the world for more than a century, Aunt Jemima eventually became an icon. By the end of the 20th century, she had undergone several face-lifts to reflect the evolving African-American consumer market.

While some products are named to entice women to buy them, none has enjoyed the success of Gold Medal flour and its Betty Crocker trade character. As a result of a successful promotional campaign for a pincushion in the 1920s, Washburn Crosby Co., the marketer of Gold Medal flour and forerunner of General Mills, found itself besieged with requests for the premium, along with more than 30,000 letters asking questions about baking.

Sam Gale, head of the company's ad department, decided that a single fictional spokeswoman should sign the response letters and decided on the name Betty Crocker. Blanche Ingersoll, a Washburn Crosby employee, became the voice of Betty Crocker on the radio in 1924. Since that time there have been at least eight different images of Betty Crocker. The most recent, introduced in 1996, was a multicultural composite of the features of 75 women of varying ethnicities.

Depression and war: Changing roles

The Great Depression and World War II left indelible marks on American society, and Rosie the Riveter and other ad icons of the time left their marks on advertising. Through the 1930s, ad copy continued to portray women primarily as homemakers or objects of sexual desire. In 1931, a magazine ad for Listerine deodorant featured a photograph of a nude woman's back and the side of her breast. Woodbury soap featured what is thought to be advertising's first full-figure b&w photograph of a nude woman (shot by Edward Steichen) in 1936.

The conflict between women's actual role in society and the ways in which advertisers portrayed that role came to the forefront during World War II. While wartime propaganda encouraged women to labor for country and family, advertisers urged female factory workers to remain glamorous and keep the home running smoothly.

Many advertisers portrayed women in their newly expanded roles. For instance, Eureka showed three women in its vacuum cleaner ads-one in a military uniform, one in pants and another in typical housewifely garb.

By late 1944, however, women were being prepared, often through strategically placed advertising, to give up their jobs when the soldiers returned home. At the end of the war, advertisers began once again to show women at home, sometimes going so far as to suggest that a working mother was not a good mother. In an advertisement by Adel Precision Products Corp., a young child asked, "Mother, when will you stay home again?"

Return to the home: The '50s

During the 1950s, most advertisers portrayed women as wives and mothers. As more women entered the workforce, however, another kind of advertising made use of them as a means for selling goods and services. Those ads showed women as clerks, telephone operators and secretaries using the latest office equipment and office furniture.

Women in the ads are generally employees not bosses, followers rather than leaders; ultimately, the ads reminded readers that a woman's job was a means for finding a man and that the primary purpose for women at work was to help men succeed.

Another approach to the portrayal of women in advertising involved scantily clad females in alluring poses; those images most often appeared in ads for products used by men.

Feminism and the '60s

One of the chief targets of the revitalized women's movement in the 1960s was the representation of women in all mass media. Advertising, although a target, also became an ally, as the industry provided a variety of venues and activities for the single, self-supporting woman.

Advertisers came under severe scrutiny from feminist groups, women's organizations and students of mass communications. As the debate over women's images in advertising intensified, the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966, sought to eliminate gender-based stereotypes in the mass media.

During the '60s, emphasis began to be placed on the independent woman who, although married, drove her own car, had a fulfilling job and participated in or made major purchasing decisions.

This era culminated in a December 1969 protest outside Macy's Department Store in New York. The protest, which may have been the first organized demonstration against the image of women in advertising, was staged against Mattel Toys in reaction to an ad the company had placed in Life to promote its Christmas toy line.

Criticism and change

In March 1970, NOW created the Barefoot & Pregnant Awards of the Week; the group distributing thousands of stickers that proclaimed: "This ad insults women."

Ad executives were re-evaluating their portrayals of women's roles in society. A classic ad from that period came from the Polaroid camera campaign featuring actors James Garner and Mariette Hartley. Ms. Hartley was shown in a distinctly non-traditional role-fixing a car.

One of the turning points in advertising's portrayal of women came with a landmark campaign from Revlon in 1973. The Charlie perfume campaign featured confident young women in tailored pantsuits pursuing traditionally male-oriented activities. Grey Advertising created the first Charlie ads.

In 1975, a new agency, Advertising to Women, was founded. Its intent was to reach the contemporary, confident, career-oriented woman who was not inhibited by her sexuality. Market research conducted by the agency showed that women were responsible for most household purchases, 60% of all vacation destination choices and nearly 30% of new car selections.

The superwoman

Advertising in the 1980s portrayed career-minded women as "supermoms," and the industry began to grapple with integrating the traditional and contemporary roles of women. One classic ad from the period was one for Enjoli perfume, which depicted a sexy but capable woman who could "bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and never let you forget you're a man."

Women Against Pornography, a U.S. lobbying group, was concerned about the sexual images of women portrayed in advertising and the influence of such images on sexual violence against women. The group founded an annual awards program to applaud and censure ads on the basis of presence or absence of sexist overtones.

In 1983, Jockey, a company known primarily for its line of men's underwear, introduced the "Jockey for Her" campaign (from Minneapolis-based Campbell Mithun), which featured real women representing a range of professions, ages and body types. The brand became an instant success; within five years, it was the most popular U.S. brand of women's underwear, commanding a 40% share of the market.

Emerging images

By the 1990s, dramatic changes had occurred in the depiction of women in advertising. One groundbreaking ads was for Maidenform, which pictured some of the objects representing slang terms for woman-a fox, a tomato, a doll and a chick. The text accompanying the ad read, "While images used to describe women are simple and obvious, women themselves rarely are. Just something we like to keep in mind when designing our lingerie."

Other advertisers also abandoned traditional strategies that had been used to depict women. During this decade, advertisers of traditionally male-targeted products-such as athletic shoes, cars and beer-began to focus on female consumers.

A new genre of advertisements came to the forefront, signaling a new attitude: "reverse sexism." Advertisers used the liberated woman's "I don't need a man" mindset to create new ads portraying women.

Bodyslimmer Lingerie showed a woman from the neck down wearing a one-piece undergarment with copy that read, "While you don't necessarily dress for men, it doesn't hurt, on occasion, to see one drool like the pathetic dog that he is."

A breakthrough for women of color occurred in 1992 when Tyra Banks, an African-American model, signed a contract to represent Cover Girl in its ads; she was the first non-white woman used in major cosmetics advertising.

Research that showed a definitive correlation between eating disorders and advertising gained prominence in the 1990s. Because many female models were extremely thin-often two to three sizes smaller than the average American woman-psychologists, nutritionists and activists focused on advertising as contributing to the growing numbers of girls and women suffering from bulimia or anorexia nervosa.

By the turn of the 21st century, many key positions in advertising were occupied by women, enabling them to exert a major influence on ad campaigns. Some critics of the portrayal of women in advertising hoped this situation would give rise to more positive images of women.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Although women are depicted in various roles and statuses in advertising-ranging from homemaker to business executive and from sex object to superwoman-it is only since the mid-20th century that women have been shown in roles other than purchaser of domestic products.

# data[].attributes.body
Only refer to resources applicable to 'Woman's Realm' and the AS element

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Created for the A Level Media Studies students at Ringwood School

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Media Language Lesson 7 - written codes - magazines

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
WJEC AS Media Studies, Media Language, written codes, Visual codes, Magazine genre

# data[].attributes.headline
Industry: How can magazines survive the current climate? Audio

# data[].attributes.subject
Industry: How can magazines survive the current climate? Audio

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Four Cs (Cross-Cultural Consumer Characterisation) - divides people into seven 'types'. This method of categorisation is primarily relevant to advertising and is helpful in understanding how magazine audiences can be categorised and targeted. The following document explains the categories - read this before undertaking the activities: http://www.4cs.yr.com/global/default.asp?tid=b0c57e2f-6b8f-4e32-8b20-5bcf74124349

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Women's Glossies and Monthly Magazines | Magforum | Happy to More!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Women's monthly magazines: the glossies and slicks. Profiles of modern and historic women's monthlies, from Aura to Queen to Tatler and Vogue

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
General weekly magazines | Magforum | Magazines and Magazine Publishers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Magazines, magazine publishers and the publishing industry explained

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Suffragette Movement, Two World Wars, the swingin' 60s, Britpop and the digital revolution - we been part of it all...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This day in magazines: Woman's Realm launch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Woman's Realm was launched on 22 February 1958 to take sales pressure off Woman - which was selling three million copies an issue - and use printing capacity at the Odhams plant in Watford, Herts. It was an updated version of the old formula of fiction plus domestic tips and information.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
IPC Media, publisher of magazines including Marie Claire, NME and What's on TV, is to be rebranded by its US-based owner to Time Inc UK.

Marcus Rich, chief executive of the newly-anointed Time Inc UK, said the company was "proud of what we have achieved at IPC over many years" but said the rebrand would provide "strategic clarity" and open up "new opportunities".

The rebrand of Time Inc's UK subsidiary comes three months after the US magazine publisher was spun off from Time Warner.

The IPC brand dates back to the 1963 when the International Publishing Corporation was created as a holding company for the Mirror newspaper group and a number of the UK's biggest magazine publishers.

IPC Magazines was created five years later, with the business bought by Reed International in 1974.

The publisher was rebranded IPC Media in 1998, following a management buyout from Reed backed by venture capital firm Cinven. IPC was bought by Time Inc, the publishing subsidiary of Time Warner, in 2001.

Joe Ripp, chairman and chief executive of Time Inc, said the switch would "help us better leverage our global portfolio ... and foster greater collaboration throughout the organisation".

The IPC Media brand has already been removed from the publisher's website, with the name relegated to a footnote on the publisher's new homepage.

Other Time Inc UK (previously IPC) magazines including Wallpaper, Woman, Countrylife, Horse and Hound and Livingetc. It closed its weekly men's magazine, Nuts, after 10 years earlier this year.
* To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email media@theguardian.com or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".* To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on and . Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
IPC name to disappear as Time Inc rebrands magazine publisher

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
IPC Media, publisher of magazines including Marie Claire, NME and What's on TV, is to be rebranded by its US-based owner to Time Inc UK. Marcus Rich, chief executive of the newly-anointed Time Inc UK, said the company was "proud of what we have achieved at IPC over many years" but said the rebrand would provide "strategic clarity" and open up "new opportunities".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For a few brief weeks in 1693, the first women's magazine in British history grappled with what would become a staple ingredient of the genre: relationship problems. The Ladies' Mercury promised to answer any questions relating to "Love etc" with "the Zeal and Softness becoming to the Sex". All the readers had to do was send in details of puzzling male behaviour to a coffee house near St Paul's and wait for "the Ladies Society" there to crack the code, or at least come up with some bracing advice about not bothering. The Mercury lasted for just four issues and was, in a pattern that would echo down the centuries, published by a man. None the less, it was the first time that "women" as a special interest category had been defined as needing a magazine, a paper room, of their very own.

Between the Covers, an exhibition at the Women's Library, is designed to narrate how we got from the "Zeal and Softness" of the Ladies' Mercury to the screaming covers of the current crop of weekly women's magazines. These are the ones that shout gleeful accusations that Kate is fighting an incipient beer gut, or that Amy is self-harming again, and then, helpfully, draw a jabbing arrow or circle to emphasise the evidence. Drawing on the library's rich holdings of periodicals, Between the Covers endeavours to show the development of the genre in the last 300 years, from the home-making (Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, Prima) to the campaigning (Englishwoman's Journal, Spare Rib) by way of the liberating (the Freewoman, Cosmopolitan) to the plain entertaining (Peg's Paper, Heat).

Less than a century after the brief experiment that was the Ladies' Mercury, the format for the women's magazine was beginning to emerge. Titles such as the Lady's Magazine combined a gawping love of royalty with needlework patterns and sentimental fiction, all for the eminently affordable price of 6d. It also, inadvertently, awakened in its readers a hunger for authorship. Invited to send in their poems, translations and stories, the ladies obliged, so that by the end of the 18th century a third of the magazine's fiction was supplied by unpaid contributors. This brought its own set of problems. Amateurs, no matter how talented, were more likely to disappear on holiday without making proper provision, or simply run out of steam. As a result, serialised novels had a knack of stopping abruptly, leaving the female reading nation wondering whether the young couple really did overcome all obstacles to their happy ending (the answer was almost certainly yes).

The moment of transformation, at which point women's magazines stopped being an elite product written and read by ladies with time on their hands, arrived in 1852 with the launch of the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. Here was a product targeted at a new market, the middle-class wife and mother who did most of her own housework. Edited and written by Samuel Beeton, a hyperactive young publisher and entrepreneur, the EDM developed the format that still gets played out in domestic magazines such as Essentials (tagline: "your life made easier every day"). There were columns on pets and cookery (written eventually by Sam's wife, Isabella Beeton of Household Management fame), and a strong emphasis on crafts. The master stroke of the magazine, however, was its coverage of fashion. By the 1860s, each issue featured a coloured plate showing anatomically impossible young women crammed into the latest Parisian fashion. This was accompanied by a paper pattern and detailed instructions on how to make the item at home. Thus the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine was able to do that clever thing of flattering its readers' sense of themselves as fashion cognoscenti while giving them the skills and tools to approximate the effect for a fraction of the price.

The magazine also contained a problem page. Every month, "Cupid's Post Bag" featured a series of anguished letters from readers whose problems were initially confined to reluctant fiancés, bossy elder sisters and resilient freckles. In his bracing, evidently male persona of "Cupid", Beeton was not afraid to jolly his "fair young friends" out of their self-pity, telling one plump correspondent that the quickest way to lose weight was to take a job as a governess to some annoying children with "a naggy mama". By the 1870s, however, the problem pages, aspirationally retitled "Conversazione", had taken on an alarming life of their own. Instead of asking for advice about gentlemen callers who had stopped calling, readers appeared to be flooding the magazine with explicit and erotic letters about the pleasures of wearing tight corsets and spurs and the effectiveness of whipping young girls and maidservants. What started out as saucy soon toppled over into downright pornographic (if you want to read the "tight-lacing" and "whipping" issues of the magazine in the British Library today, you have to sit at a special desk of shame under the watchful eye of a librarian). Increasingly it became impossible to tell whether these were genuine letters from domestic Englishwomen or feverish fakes inserted into Cupid's post bag by none other than Cupid himself.

Quite apart from its weirdness - the contemporary equivalent would involve the letters pages of Good Housekeeping being given over to readers describing the thrills of threesomes - this process points up the characteristically porous nature of women's magazines. Just as readers became writers in the early Lady's Magazine, so today's consumer of Bella, Prima or even Grazia is urged to email her reactions to the "top stories" or vote on some pressing issue, and in doing so generates more content for the magazine. The fantasy, if not the practice (these products are, after all, put together by professional journalists), is that a reader of a women's magazine may become its co-author at any moment. What's more, although a title may present itself as tightly defined (in the rhetorical world of women's magazines, "the Cosmo girl" could never be confused with the Bella reader), there is always an anxiety that it is in fact on the point of dissolving into something else. Just as Samuel Beeton's version of the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine veered perilously close to the kind of pornography circulated in gentlemen's clubs, so more recently the "lads' mags" of the 1990s have had to argue strongly that they should not be consigned to the top shelf of the newsagents. Nuts is not Knave, although the casual reader would be hard-pressed to say exactly why.

Contemporary to the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine was the Englishwoman's Journal, which explicitly campaigned for women to have a legal, economic and social identity outside the home. This was not because the ladies of the Englishwoman's Journal (and, confusingly, they were ladies - mostly the daughters of upper-middle-class men with fortunes of their own) had anything against domesticity. But they wanted to make sure that when home life failed a woman - because her father died or her brother went bankrupt - there were alternatives to the faux-genteel and poorly paid option of becoming a governess. As a kind of forerunner of Spare Rib, the Englishwoman's Journal campaigned for girls to be trained as engravers, commercial artists, and schoolteachers. Aware of the potential offence of its message, the magazine was careful to take a high moral line, unlike its natural successor, the boldly named Freewoman, which was banned by WH Smith in 1911 for being "disgusting . . . indecent, immoral and filthy".

And then there were the magazines for the mill and shop girls, full of fantasy-fuelling fiction involving mostly cross-class romance. In these serial novels, viscounts and sheikhs had an odd habit of hanging around places where ordinary girls might trip over them and steal their hearts. Even then, they wanted watching. A cover from a 1926 edition of Peg's Paper shows a dodgy-looking aristo with a girl in a cheap cloche hat, and underneath the words: "COULD SHE TRUST HIM?" The tone, though careful, is not remotely improving. While the mothers of these girls might have been obliged to slog through the pious homilies of the Servants' Magazine, thoughtfully provided by their employers, these economically independent young women simply wanted a sweetener for their slivers of free time. Today they would be pouring over Heat, trying to decide whether Kelly Osbourne was right to lose all that weight.

What Between the Covers reminds you again and again is that magazines, rather than naturally occurring phenomena summoned up by their readers' desires, are in fact commodities of the most intricate kind. Few other artefacts, after all, have to be sold twice simultaneously to be considered successful. But this is exactly what a magazine editor must do, selling her product both to the reader via the cover price and to the advertisers through the rate card. As a result, women's magazines proliferate, clone and collapse according to a positively Darwinian model of the market.

That is why the virtually identical Woman and Woman's Own were started within a few years of each other by rival companies in the 1930s. It is why, in the late 70s, National Magazines brought out Company, as a way of mopping up some of the excess appetite created by its monster market leader, Cosmopolitan. It's why, too, magazines are folded into one another when they start to fail. It happened in the 1830s when the Lady's Magazine merged with La Belle Assemblée before quietly disappearing altogether, just as it happened over a hundred years later when Harper's merged with the Queen to become Harpers & Queen. It then dropped the monarch and has reinvented itself as Harper's Bazaar.

Among these quiet, long-drawn-out euthanasias, the exhibition includes a few luxuriant flops. I was disconcerted to find that I had contributed to most of them. There was, for instance, Working Woman, an imported American title that lasted for three brief years in the mid-1980s under the legendary and slightly scary Audrey Slaughter. The magazine had a kind of fatal fissure running through it. On page after page, purposeful-looking women in business suits explained how they had got to the top in the corporate world. These articles were interspersed with pieces, some of which I wrote, on how to find a mascara that would take you from boardroom to bedroom. The thing just didn't hang together. As we know now, women who bustle around with briefcases read the Economist by day and switch to Vogue in the bath. They don't need a hybrid that tries to do both. (Having said this, it always seems extraordinary that Marie Claire and now Grazia manage to solder pieces on Darfur together with an account of Madonna's divorce. In any other context, this would surely count as a gross lapse of taste.) The other flop featured in the exhibition is Riva, which lasted eight expensive weeks before bowing to the (at the time) inevitable conclusion that "glossy" and "weekly" were not adjectives that could coexist in the same sentence.

Yet other parts of the show remind one that, for all their emphasis on nowness and newness, women's magazines can only develop at the same rate as the culture itself, which means unevenly. A computer screen offers the chance to take a 1978 Cosmopolitan quiz entitled "How Liberated Are You?", which includes questions both quaint - "Is it right that more men than women go to university?" - and bang up-to-date - "Do you agree that women are expected to juggle too many roles?" As always, I couldn't work out the scoring system and left Between the Covers unable to say for sure whether I was liberated or not.

What will happen to women's magazines in the future is unclear. History suggests that they do well in a recession, with more launches during the difficult period of 1870-1900 than at any other time. Doomsayers point to the web as the eventual graveyard of the print magazine, while others emphasise that these products are consumed in places where access to a computer is either difficult or dangerous, the bus or the bath. Perhaps the most important consideration is the way that, over the last 20 years, newspapers have increasingly colonised the tone, subjects and even formats of women's magazines. Whether in stand-alone supplements or incorporated on to the feature pages, newspapers now roam through the familiar territories of love, sex, food, fashion and family. Sometimes they get it wrong, but more often they do it very well indeed. What exactly that leaves for women's magazines, and whether they will be able to fashion something new out of readers' residual desires, remains to be seen.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For a few brief weeks in 1693, the first women's magazine in British history grappled with what would become a staple ingredient of the genre: relationship problems. The Ladies' Mercury promised to answer any questions relating to "Love etc" with "the Zeal and Softness becoming to the Sex".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
THE weekly magazine Woman's Realm, which has treated generations of readers to knitting patterns and 20 quick recipes for chicken, is folding after its publisher judged it was out of touch with modern women.

'Dowdy image': the magazine is to be merged with its sister publication, Woman's Weekly

The title, which was launched in 1958, still has sales of 152,000 but has failed to shake off its "dowdy image", IPC said yesterday. It will be merged with its sister publication, Woman's Weekly, while IPC hopes to attract its more upmarket readers to a new magazine, Your Life.

The company believes the new title - whose first issue includes articles on designer shoes and women terrorists as well as exotic travel, "decadent" lifestyles and fashion - is more representative of the lives of women in their late thirties and forties.

Mary Frances, the editor of both Woman's Realm and Your Life, said that research for IPC showed that Woman's Realm's content no longer reflected the financially independent lives of its target readership. The research suggests that such women do not necessarily believe that marriage is for life and that a high percentage will have tried illegal drugs.

She said: "We tried to change the magazine but it is still associated with knitting, even though we haven't carried patterns for six years. The lives of women in their forties and fifties are quite different to their mother's generation or even to 10 years ago.

"We've got women like Madonna, Sharon Stone and Lulu in their forties now. Women are more confident now. They were the first generation to take the Pill and go to pop festivals. These are women who have been at the vanguard of social change and refuse to think middle-aged."

While the staple diet of Women's Realm has been subjects such as health and decorating advice, IPC's research suggests that the current generation of readers are more interested in indulging themselves. With their children having left home, the so-called "empty nesters" have the time and money for such luxuries as Christmas shopping trips to New York and buying a second car.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Woman's Realm fails to find recipe for its survival

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
THE weekly magazine Woman's Realm, which has treated generations of readers to knitting patterns and 20 quick recipes for chicken, is folding after its publisher judged it was out of touch with modern women.

# data[].attributes.body
The Swinging Sixties

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Swinging Sixties is Britain's most defining decade | News | UKTV Corporate Site

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A third admit they would rather live in the sixties than current day

# data[].attributes.body
1960s-The Diamond Decade

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
They were an explicit act of revolt against the barriers of age, class and the division between popular and high culture - a force that nobody could afford to ignore. "Serious" music critics deliberated on whether Lennon and McCartney were composers the equal of Mahler and Brahms; Harold Wilson pandered to popular taste by dolling out MBEs to the group.

By 1966, the pop revolution, of which the Beatles were in the vanguard, had made London the cultural capital of the world - or at least the pop-cultural capital of the world, which for a while was the only culture that mattered. London was officially "The Swinging City" as Time magazine famously pronounced, the global hub of youthful creativity, hedonism and excitement. "In a decade dominated by youth, London has burst into bloom. It swings; it is the scene."

Well, yes, and no. Few Londoners, let alone Britons, were dancing at the Ad Lib or having their hair cut by Vidal Sassoon, "the man with the magic comb", as Time had it. (In the suburbs of south London, the less celebrated Mr Tony was styling my hair in the centre-parted-fringe, blow-dried-from-the-crown neo-Mod style that, along with a mohair suit, was de rigueur for 16 year-olds at the Orchid Ballroom, Purley.)

Time was, anyway, a year or two too late. By 1966, the ripples of Swinging London were already a flood, sweeping through music, fashion and film, from Antonioni's Blow Up - a painfully self-conscious study of Sixties hipness - to Clive Donner's Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. A bittersweet confection about a teenager in the suburbs (filmed in the swinging purlieus of Stevenage) desperate to taste the fruits of the burgeoning sexual freedoms, Donner's film perfectly captured the blithe innocence, and fabulous music, of the times - and actually made a deeper impression on me (call it identification) than Blow Up.

Richard Hamilton, meanwhile, would make his own ironic riposte to Swinging London, and the establishment's revenge, with his painting Swingeing London, which showed Mick Jagger and the art-dealer Robert Fraser being driven away in handcuffs after the Jagger drugs trial of 1967.

For a teenager, music was the medium through which all these cultural upheavals were filtered. The Who's My Generation was a two-fingered salute to anyone who dared question the new tyranny of youth, while the group's climactic destruction of their equipment was a direct homage to the "auto-destructive" art of Gustav Metzger.

Shock. It was all the fashion, in drama as well as music and art. The Theatre of the Absurd and the Theatre of Cruelty sought to break down the "hierarchical" barriers between performers and audience; to challenge bourgeois assumptions about such vital (for the time) questions as Britain's support for America in the Vietnam War, and to test the limits of censorship - and, all too frequently, the audience's patience.

In 1965, the Royal Court was obliged to turn itself temporarily into a private club to stage Edward Bond's Saved, with its notorious scene of a baby being stoned to death. (The ruse did not prevent the theatre being prosecuted). The Telegraph's W A Darlington reflected that "my only emotion was a cold disgust at being asked to sit through such a scene". The Queen did not attend Saved. Her sole theatrical excursion in 1965 was to a production of Hello Dolly starring Mary Martin at the Drury Lane Theatre.

What all these disparate events signalled was a challenge to "the System", as the jargon of the day had it, that would become as political as it was cultural.

Jim Haynes is largely forgotten now, but he was an important architect of what became known as "the underground". An expatriate American, in 1959 Haynes opened The Paperback in Edinburgh, the first bookshop in Britain to stock the writings of the American "Beat" authors and Henry Miller at a time when his books were banned under the obscenity laws.

Moving to London, he was one of the founders in 1966 of IT, Britain's first underground newspaper, and in the same year he established the Arts Lab in Drury Lane - London's first space for the artistic "happenings" which so characterised the period. Its ideology, Haynes said, "was to never say the word 'no'. And out of it, God knows what would happen, but whatever it was would be fun." He might have been talking about the underground as a whole.

Once again, the Beatles were in the vanguard. At the time of Sgt Pepper, even the Queen reportedly remarked that "the Beatles are getting a little strange these days".

Of course, it was to be short-lived. The underground fractured into political radicalism, drug-bound apathy and naked commercial ambition. True to Hamilton's dictum, Pop's counter-culture had become big business, revolt had become style. On September 27 1968, the "love rock" musical Hair opened in London - a day after the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain's role as theatre censor. Hair was the first theatrical production to portray full-frontal nudity on a West End stage, the first rock musical, and certainly the first to include songs celebrating hashish, LSD and, as one song title succinctly put it, Sodomy.

Outside the theatre, hippies - real ones - protested at the "exploitation" of the counter-culture. But I loved it. To an impressionable 17 year-old it felt like a celebration of all that was transgressive, idealistic - and fun. I didn't realise it was an epitaph.

Four months later, the Beatles gave their last public performance on the rooftop of Apple's headquarters in Savile Row, London. Swinging London, and the revolution, was officially dead, and the Sixties with it. Hard political and economic reality were just around the corner. But nothing would ever be the same again.

1960s bestselling albums

1 Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band The Beatles 1967

2 The Sound of Music Soundtrack 1965

3 With The Beatles The Beatles 1963

4 Abbey Road The Beatles 1969

5 South Pacific Soundtrack 1962

6 Beatles for Sale The Beatles 1964

7 A Hard Day's Night The Beatles 1964

8 Rubber Soul The Beatles 1965

9 Rubber Soul The Beatles 1965

10 West Side Story Soundtrack 1962

Bestselling singles

1 She Loves You The Beatles 1963

2 I Want To Hold Your Hand The Beatles 1963

3 Tears Ken Dodd 1965

4 Can't Buy Me Love The Beatles 1964

5 I Feel Fine The Beatles 1964

6 The Carnival Is Over Seekers 1965

7 Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out The Beatles 1965

8 Release Me Engelbert Humperdinck 1967

9 It's Now Or Never Elvis Presley1960

10 Green, Green Grass Of Home Tom Jones 1966

Top movies

1 The Sound of Music 1965

2 The Jungle Book 1968

3 Thunderball 1966

4 Mary Poppins 1964

5 Goldfinger 1964

6 Ben Hur 1960

7 The Guns of Navarone 1961

8 Doctor Zhivago 1967

9 One Hundred and One Dalmatians 1961

10 Oliver! 1963

Top West End shows

1 Black and White Minstrels 1962

2 Oliver! 1960

3 The Sound of Music 1961

4 Creeper 1961

5 Charlie Girl 1965

6 Pajama Tops 1969

7 Canterbury Tales 1968

8 Boeing-Boeing 1960

9 Fiddler on the Roof 1967

10 There's a Girl in My Soup 1966

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
They were an explicit act of revolt against the barriers of age, class and the division between popular and high culture - a force that nobody could afford to ignore. "Serious" music critics deliberated on whether Lennon and McCartney were composers the equal of Mahler and Brahms; Harold Wilson pandered to popular taste by dolling out MBEs to the group.

# data[].attributes.body
Changing Britain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Moral codes

Social and cultural change has also reflected the extent to which the population has become more individualistic and less deferential.

The moral code that prevailed in 1945 broke down, a process formalised by legal changes in the 1960s. Abortion and homosexuality became legal, capital punishment was abolished, and measures were taken to improve the position of women.

These changes were linked to shifts in religious practice. By the 1990s, only one in seven Britons was an active member of a Christian church, although more claimed to be believers.

But for most believers, formal expressions of faith became less important. The failure in the 1990s of the heavily church-backed 'Keep Sunday Special' campaign (to prevent shops from opening on the sabbath) confirmed the general trend.

More generally, the authority of age and experience were overthrown and, in their place, came an emphasis on youth and novelty.

This was seen in politics with, for example, the lowering of the voting age to 18; in the economy, with the rise of the youth consumer; and in culture, with marked changes in popular music.

The 1960s destroyed a cultural continuity that had lasted since the Victorian period.

Alongside the apparent continuity in popular culture of works such as the James Bond films, the novels of Dick Francis and the radio soap 'The Archers', there were also important shifts, for example in popular music.

In the 1960s, pop music - not least that of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones - gave Britain a very different feel in the world to that it had enjoyed as the world's predominant empire.

The Liverpool Sound, the Swinging Sixties, and the London of Carnaby Street created an image far removed from that of 1956 when, in a last major flourish of imperial power, Britain had unsuccessfully sought to intimidate Egypt in the Suez Crisis.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Social and cultural change has also reflected the extent to which the population has become more individualistic and less deferential. The moral code that prevailed in 1945 broke down, a process formalised by legal changes in the 1960s. Abortion and homosexuality became legal, capital punishment was abolished, and measures were taken to improve the position of women.

# data[].attributes.body
Changing Role of Women in 60s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC Two - History File, 20th Century World, The changing role of women in the 1960s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The role and status of women in society in the 1960s.